The VTech Innotab is a young children’s tablet for learning. When I picked up two of them from the local Target, we installed the six free games but was rather disappointed with the video capabilities listed in the manual:

File Type: AVI

Resolution: 480 x 272

Video Codec: MJPEG

Video Bit rate: 2400kbps

Frame rate: 15fps

Audio Sampling Rate: 22.05kHz

Audio Channel: Mono

Audio Encoder: PCM

MJPEG is a very poor codec as it produces quite large files and tends to be very blocky with any type of motion. After a bit of research, I discovered that the Innotab would accept MPEG4 video but the audio still had to be PCM mono. So the MPEG4 video file specification:

File Type: AVI

Resolution: 480 x 272

Video Codec: MPEG4 with a video tag of “XVID”

Video Bit rate: variable or a maximum of 3000kbps

Frame rate: 29.997fps

Audio Sampling Rate: 22.05kHz

Audio Channel: Mono

Audio Encoder: PCM

I chose to use ffmpeg as it is available on all major platforms. There are a few steps that need to be performed to create a working video:

Convert the video. We use “-1” for the height as we want to keep the aspect of the original video